To Remember To Give
by Sassy Chow
Summary: Ever read the summary, "A new girl arrives at Seigaku, ready to face her new trials and blah blah blah, meet new friends, face challenges, get past the stereotypes of female tennis players?" Well, this is no different! Except...for the tennis part.


  
A/N: My first Mary Sue!! I'm so proud XD   
  
To Remember To Give  
Chapter 1

* * *

Dressed in a plaid skirt and a buttoned down shirt, she shifted the bag as she walked. The new junior high school was situated near her new house, and her brother had forced her to walk. So now, having been stuck wearing street clothes since her new uniform hadn't arrived yet and forced to use her old school bag, it was unlikely she was going to get away with receiving as little attention as possible.  
  
She sighed.  
  
Turning the corner, she was met by a set of gates and large words looming up at her. Seishun Gakuen Junior Highschool. "Wonderful", she muttered. Her shoulders slumped. She had resigned herself to this a long time ago, but somehow, arriving at this particular 'prestigious' school made things so damned final.   
  
It was a quick trip from the gate to the front, entering the double doors and almost immediately earning strange glances and stares from the students. She stood out, not just because of her cloths, but her hair that fell in strips by the side of her face and down the base of her neck, streaked with pale blue. She stood in a very uncaring manner, hand at the strap over her shoulder to prevent her bag from slipping and the other in her pocket, looking around as she gazed at what was to be her school for the next two years.  
  
With a sigh, she moved on.  
  
It seemed like a nice enough school, she mused to herself. The classrooms were all kept neat and the hallways were occupied by students who lingered and talked quietly in soft tones. It was almost scarily calm compared to her old school back home. "That's one good thing I suppose", she said absentmindedly, brushing back strands of hair from her face.   
  
Turning the corner, she was met with two boys whom were talking between themselves. They both seemed a year older than her, one who was slightly taller than the other two, with glasses and a stern expression and the second one had soft green eyes and short hair, speaking with an easygoing smile. Raising an eyebrow, she stared quite freely, intrigued. All the other students who passed by these two threw admiring glances at their backs, but no one bothered to walk up to them to strike up a conversation or to interrupt theirs. 'Is there a social ladder in this school?'  
  
The second one suddenly glanced over at her and his eyes widened in surprise. With a look of uncertainty, he walked over to her and she steeled herself, meeting his curious gaze with a challenging stare.   
  
"Ah…miss, are you looking for anyone? It is during school hours and no visitors are allowed…"  
  
She blinked, and shook her head. "I'm looking for the administration office. I'm new", she muttered quietly in slight accented Japanese.  
  
"Oh!" He had the decency to look surprised. "The office is on the other side of the school – if you came from the front, you went in the wrong direction." He smiled again, warmly, and she was struck by how…nice he looked to be.  
  
"Thanks." She nodded, feeling extremely self-conscious, and turned to walk away.   
  
"Just turn left and go straight. When you go past the front doors, go in the opposite direction and than turn right", he said.  
  
She twisted slightly around, eyeing him with curiosity. "Hm…thank you again." With that, she continued on her way, feeling like an idiot. From behind her, she could hear the boy returning to his conversation with the stern boy and she picked up her pace, feeling the need to get out of the hall and away from the stares, as soon as possible.  
  
With the boy's instructions, she reached the admin office quickly enough. It was a quick process from there, having been given a schedule, a slip excusing her for lack of uniform (and the hair, which she was told had to be out of all the 'extra colour' by next week), and a map of the school. When she made her way out of the office and into the world of Seishun Gakuen once again, she was surprised. The school was extremely big, with two main buildings and several sports facilities. There were even several tennis courts, on both sides of the school.   
  
"Oh…right. Brother said this school was famous for its tennis team…or something", she muttered quietly as she followed the map upstairs to the second floor, looking up at the signs, trying to find the classroom labelled 2D. She was a second year, 13 years old, and finally reached her classroom after ten minutes of aimless walking.  
  
On the way, she threw the map out.  
  
She shouldered her pack again. Raising a hand, she knocked. Three seconds later, the door slammed open, she jumped and stared wide eyed at the teacher who stood glaring down at her, a furious look on his face.   
  
"Get in!" He barked and moved to the side, walking back to his desk. Tentatively, she stepped into the classroom and glanced around, seeing the neat rows of students staring at her in confusion and several looking as furious as the teacher. 'Great, my class just happens to be composed of a bunch of temperamental students. Wonderful.'  
  
She handed him her slip wordlessly, just as he looked like he was about to scream at her at first glance. Waiting patiently as he read, she glanced surreptitiously around her. The room was dead silent.  
  
The teacher finally relaxed a tad bit, glancing at her calmly rather than with suppressed anger like before. She mentally sighed in relief. She definitely didn't want to get in this teacher's way.  
  
"Takahoshi Izumi, is it?" Seeing her nod in response, he turned to the class. "Class, this is Takahoshi. She will be with us for the remainder of the year." Then he turned back to her. "You'll sit next to Ikeda."  
  
She nodded and turned to the class. It was fairly obvious that the one who had a very displeased look on his face was this 'Ikeda', and the empty desk beside his that was right by the window was the only one left unoccupied in the classroom. "Hai, sensei. And the slip – I need it for my next class", she said quickly and he handed her the paper. Quickly weaving her way through the maze of desks, she found hers and sat down, pulling her bag onto her lap. And then it was as if she had never came. The teacher went back to teaching and the class went back to arguing with him. But the stares were extremely obvious and she forced herself to look straight, recognizing some of the math equations the teacher was writing on the board.   
  
She had heard that the education system in Asia was far more advanced than in North America, especially in countries like Japan and China. The expectations were much higher, which was why she was fairly surprised that she actually understood what was being taught. They were doing lines. The students were answering the questions that the teacher asked rapidly, so this seemed more like a review session than anything.  
  
Sighing for the third time that day, she took out a notebook and a pencil quickly in order to jot down whatever she could. It was going to take her ages to catch up. She could already feel it.

* * *

That day at practice, Arai scowled as the first years chattered amongst themselves, neglecting the balls that lay sprawled across the tennis court grounds. The regulars were away at a small tournament held at the local tennis courts, and had pretty much left the second years in charge. That meant Arai was one of the second years that had a little more control than everyone else, and he felt it his responsibility to keep the pandemonium to a bare minimum.  
  
Bare minimum meaning obedience from the first years and practice for the second.  
  
Barking at the giggling idiots for the second time that day, he watched with satisfaction as they scurried for the tennis balls. He then looked around. Ikeda was late to practice. He was damned lucky the regulars weren't here today, or he'd be running laps for the rest of his life for being fifteen minutes late.  
  
"Oi, Arai!"   
  
He turned around. Ikeda was running towards him, an exasperated expression crossing his face. When he made it to Arai side, he looked around and sighed, running a hand through his short hair. "Damn, I'm late."  
  
"Yeah", Arai commented, and glanced at him. "Where've you been? Usually you're earlier than me."  
  
"That new girl in my class", he started, and with that, his expression grew angry. "I had to take her all over the school 'cause Yoruba-sensei forced me to be her 'guide'."  
  
He laughed, because it was in his nature to do, and also because it was damned funny. Ikeda was probably one of the least patient people he knew, himself coming in a close second. To imagine his friend leading some girl was enough to send him into hysterics.   
  
Watching his friend laughing, he growled and his mood darkened. Grabbing his racket from his bag, he stalked over to one of the courts, leaving his friend behind. Picking a tennis ball up from the ground, he wheeled around, and pointed his racket at Arai. "C'mon, stop laughing, damn it. Play a game with me."  
  
Arai smirked challengingly and ran to the other side of the court, racket held tight in his hand. Now he was in familiar territory, and he positioned himself on the left side of the court as Ikeda served from the right. Soon it became a rapid game of the ball bouncing back and forth. He hit the ball so that it landed just over the net and Ikeda was forced to lob it.  
  
Grinning at his friend, he backed up, jumped, and brought his racket down hard, the ball flying back towards Ikeda, smashing the ground at the far end of the court, before bouncing away.   
  
"Fifteen love", he said, before getting back in position. This was going to be a fun game.  
  
"Damn", Ikeda hissed as his friend's shot went over his head. It was the true that Arai was probably better than him by a lot, since he was considered to be the only second year other than Kaidou Kaoru and Momoshiro Takeshi to even have a chance of making it into the regulars once the third years graduated. Arai played tennis with determination and mostly stubbornness, although at times said stubbornness could turn nasty. He couldn't bear to have someone be better than him, especially when said someone was a year younger than him.   
  
Ikeda ran up to the net and was defeated once again by a smash that was aimed at the lower court. Arai was leading again. It was unsurprising.  
  
He lost - six games to three.  
  
Wiping perspiration from his forehead, he nodded in thanks as Arai handed him a water bottle. His friend was grinning widely.  
  
"Feeling better?"  
  
He shrugged, picking up his racket again. "Yeah. Not as annoyed, anyway."  
  
"Heh, I never knew a girl could irritate you so much Ikeda. This must be one heck of girl."  
  
"She's weird, that's all."  
  
By the end of the practise, Ikeda had forgotten the reason he had been late and the second years had left the courts, satisfied with today's practice, leaving the first years to finish cleaning up – sweeping the courts, collecting the balls and storing them away.  
  
It wasn't until Arai was sitting at his desk late at night in his bedroom rushing to finish pages from his English workbook that he remembered how he had forgotten to ask Ikeda what he had done to make the teacher punish him.

* * *

He knocked on the door. The response was muffled, but he assumed it was affirmative, so he opened it and saw his sister hunched over her desk, surrounded by opened binders and textbooks, a look of complete frustration crossing her face. He took one look and sighed.  
  
"Izumi, what are you doing?" he asked and she whipped around to face him, her mop of black and blue hair flying. Brown eyes glared at him darkly.   
  
"Did you know the second years are already studying acids and bases in science? And they'll be learning how to find point of intersections next week? And there's a test coming up in two days? The only class I'm not falling behind in is English! I don't even know what a point of intersection is!" She exclaimed in English and threw a small notebook half way across her room and it landed on her bed with a thump.  
  
He walked over to sit on her bed, a single bed covered with a soft blue quilt she had brought from home. Picking up the book, he realized it was a scrapbook of sorts that had been given to her from her previous classmates. She kept silent as he flipped through the pages. There were pictures of his sister and her friends, of their classes. There were signatures and small messages written in multi-coloured ink. On the last page was a picture of Izumi and her homeroom teacher. He looked up.  
  
She was breathing heavily, glaring at the wall across from her.   
  
"Izu, as long as you do your best, everything will be fine", he said softly.  
  
Izumi shook her head rapidly. "No it won't. You know it won't. But I'm going to have to endure it anyway."  
  
He studied her. Her eyes were half-lidded and she seemed sadder than she usually was. "How was your first day?"  
  
There was silence as he patiently waited for her answer. "I got lost first thing in the morning, got accused of being a Japanese wannabe by some guy sitting beside me, was forced to follow said guy around the school because the teacher forced him to be my 'guide'. Got yelled at twice for lack of uniform, attracted stares wherever I went, and was held up for fifteen minutes because said guy refused to show me how to get out of the stupid school after the bell rang."  
  
Her brother blinked. "Well, that was quite an eventful day. What do you mean you were accused of being a Japanese wannabe?"  
  
Izumi shrugged. "Just that. He said I looked strange, acted strange, spoke strangely. Said I was some foreigner who doesn't belong. Eh, doesn't matter."  
  
He looked at least mildly angry. "Did you report him? That's prejudice right there."  
  
She shook her head, rolling her eyes. "Obviously not. Besides he got punished anyway. It's not what he said that matters, I could care less what he thought of me. But he's right. I'm Japanese but I'm not. I don't know anything about Japanese customs or whatever they do here. I can only speak the language, and not even very well. I suck at writing and reading. There's no way I'll ever belong here."  
  
He frowned. "How can you say that? You've only been here for several days. Give it time. You'll adjust and everything will be fine."  
  
"Hm, I suppose." She glanced around at the mess, and sighed, standing up from her seat. "I'll clean this up tomorrow. Where's dad?"  
  
"He's working late tonight again. But he said he'd be home for dinner tomorrow though, so we're going out. You'll be home, won't you?" He smiled at her kindly.  
  
"Ah." She gathered a few random sheets and piled them together. "It's not as if I have a choice, Ken, not as if I have any friends to go out with. Mom used to be home every night and she'll never leave me alone in the house to prepare my own dinner." She regretted her words almost immediately when a hurt expression crossed over his face for a split second, before disappearing beneath a hesitant smile. He stood up and walked towards the door, before turning around to look at her sadly.   
  
She hated that look.  
  
"Well, dinner's almost done, so come downstairs in fifteen minutes, will you?" he asked with a tentative look at her schoolwork before walking out of the room and shutting the door quietly behind him.  
  
She stared at the door for a few more seconds, before collapsing back onto her chair, disgruntled. "Damn it all to hell."  
  
She could already tell. She was going to hate it here.

* * *

A/N: Hate? Do you already feel the urge to murder the 'new girl'? Or are you tentative with the story plot – curious as to how it will turn out? Do you consider Takahoshi Izumi to be the biggest Mary Sue to grace the tenipuri section of fanfiction.net?   
  
Please comment   
  



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